THE ESTATE OF LARRY BROWN

“Larry Brown wrote the way the best singers sing: with honesty, grit, and the kind of raw emotion that stabs you right in the heart. He was a singular American treasure.” 
— Tim McGraw

Larry Brown was born in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he lived all his life. At the age of thirty, a captain in the Oxford Fire Department, he decided to become a writer and worked toward that goal for eight years before publishing his first book, FACING THE MUSIC, a collection of stories. With the publication of his first novel, DIRTY WORK, he quit the fire station in order to write full time. His memoir, ON FIRE, tells the story of his many years as a firefighter.

Until his untimely death in 2004, Brown published eight more books. His last, the unfinished A MIRACLE OF CATFISH was published posthumously thanks to the collaborative effort of his longtime editor, Shannon Ravenel, and his wife, Mary Annie Brown. In his short creative time, Brown was awarded the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction and was the first two-time winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction, which he won in 1992 for JOE, and again in 1997 for FATHER AND SON. He was the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award and Mississippi's Governor's Award For Excellence in the Arts. The story "Big Bad Love" became the basis for a feature film, as did his novel JOE.

Larry Brown died at the age of 53 in the town of Oxford, MS where he was born and raised. Where he lived and wrote.